Brave New World

The English author Aldous Huxley wrote the dystopian novel Brave New World in 1931 and saw it published the following year. It takes place mostly in a future World State, where citizens are engineered into a social hierarchy based on intelligence, and it anticipates developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, conditioning and psychological manipulation. Huxley revisited the subject in an essay, Brave New World Revisited, and wrote a utopian counterpart in his final novel, Island.

The opening is set in London, a World State city, in AF 632, the equivalent of 2540, where citizens are grown in artificial wombs and conditioned through childhood into fixed castes matched to intelligence and labour. Children are graded before birth, and everyone is made to love the work they will do. Stability is maintained with the holiday drug soma, and with the absence of families, deep attachments and any reason to want something unavailable.

Bernard Marx is unhappy in ways his conditioning never planned for, and Lenina Crowne takes her holidays in the usual way and starts to wonder about them anyway. Between them arrives a man raised outside the system on an old reservation, who has read the books the World State decided were dangerous and cannot understand how anyone lives like this. The book is often read alongside George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which approaches a similar society from the opposite direction.

It is a standalone work.